The SALT Forum, a group of companies with a shared goal of accelerating the use of speech technologies in multimodal and telephony systems, has contributed the Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) specification to the World Wide Web Consortium. The SALT Forum has asked the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group and Voice Browser Working Group to review the SALT specification as part of their development of standards for promoting multimodal interaction and voice-enabling the Web.

There's a growing interest in multimodal applications, including the use of speech technologies to expand the reach of Web content. "Many companies within the speech technology industry view standards as key to speeding acceptance of speech-enabled multimodal applications," said Bill Meisel, president of TMA Associates. "The contribution of the SALT specification to the W3C gives the group a robust starting point for creating a single standard for multimodal applications, which is ultimately in the best interest for the speech industry."

The SALT specification defines a set of lightweight tags as extensions to commonly used Web-based markup languages. This allows developers to add speech interfaces to Web content and applications using familiar tools and techniques. The SALT specification is designed to work equally well on a wide variety of computing and communicating devices.

Additional information on the SALT specification is available at www.saltforum.org. .